For razor scientists at World Shaving
HQ, the face is the final frontier

By JOEL STEIN /BOSTON

Three of the cleanest-shaven men in the
world are beaming. For 27 years the third blade, like Darwin's
missing link or Fermat's last theorem, had eluded them. The idea
of three blades dancing on the head of a razor was so
preposterous that Saturday Night Live used it as a commercial
parody in 1975. To the engineers at Gillette, that joke was a
cruel mockery, a searing reminder of their limitations.

Last Tuesday the shame disappeared. Gillette is unveiling the
Mach3, the three-bladed wonder these three engineers had often
glimpsed but never captured. Giddy for men of their age and
earnestness, they exhibit their high-tech gizmo in a small,
unadorned office in a brick, Industrial Age building in South
Boston topped with Hollywood-style letters spelling out WORLD
SHAVING HEADQUARTERS. John Terry, the elderly, thick-glassed
British engineer whose team came up with the design for the
successor to the twin-track Sensor, cradles the prototype between
his thumb and forefinger as if it were a Honus Wagner. Terry, who
has two degrees in metallurgy, talks about his invention as if it
were the fax machine.

"We do the far-out stuff," he boasts of his
engineers in England. "I have made things that do horrible
things to my face." He calls the Mach3--the first razor with
racing stripes--his proudest achievement. It's not just the third
blade, he explains. It's that they staggered the blades so each
is progressively closer to the skin, dipped the ultra-thin blades
in the same carbon that computer chips go into to make them
stronger, and--here's the really big deal--made the blade pivot
from the bottom, not the middle, forcing shavers to use it like a
paintbrush. They also applied for 35 patents.

Security inside World Shaving Headquarters rivals the
Pentagon's. The Mach3 is manufactured inside the Plywood Ranch, a
section of the factory floor that is actually barricaded by
steel. In the only major breach Steven Davis, an engineer at
Wright Industries, a subcontractor that built one of the machines
that manufacture the razor handles, was nabbed by the FBI and the
U.S. Attorney's office and pleaded guilty to trying to sell a
sketch of the Mach3. On Friday he was sentenced to two years and
three months in federal prison.

More than 500 of America's best engineers, with degrees from
such places as M.I.T. and Stanford, built this razor while their
friends worked on the Mars Pathfinder. "In recruiting
engineers," says Terry, "I say nowhere else makes
thousands of miles of the sharpest thing known to man and has to
worry about interaction with biological tissue. You don't have to
worry about persuading them after that." Dan Lazarchik got a
degree in mechanical engineering from M.I.T. and a master's in
technical engineering from Boston University. "At first
friends say, 'What's to it?' But it's amazing--more people want
to talk to me about my job than to the people who have the sexier
jobs at Intel. Everyone has something to say about shaving."

More than 300 volunteers take part in the shave-in-plant
program. These men come to work, remove their shirts, enter one
of 20 booths, receive shaving gear from a lab-coated technician,
shave the left side of their face with one unmarked razor, the
right half with another, and input their preferences into a
computer. They risk profuse bleeding, they are not paid, and
there is a sizable waiting list. This proves one of three things:
either, as Gillette claims, its employees are very proud, or men
are excited by all new technology, or people would rather shave
at work. The manager of the program has a full beard.

These shavers are not testing the Mach3. They are testing the
next razor, probably due out in eight to 10 years. The designers
are done conceptualizing that one, guided by their motto,
"If there's a better way to shave--and we believe there
is--we will find it." When delivered by Mike Cowhig, a
30-year Gillette employee and senior vice president of
manufacturing and technical operations, it sounds less like a
threat to the competition than like something from Captain Kirk's
log.

The Mach3 will arrive in stores in July, priced at $6.29 to
$6.79 for four cartridges, or 35% more than Gillette's Sensor
Excel. It will be promoted by a $300 million marketing budget
that will include an ad involving a jet producing three sonic
booms before morphing into a razor wielded by a guy who looks as
if he grows as much facial hair as Matt Damon.

The next concern, Cowhig explains, is to make a Mach3 for
women, many of whom are still using disposables. "Women
aren't as evolved as shavers," he explains. Women's razors,
Cowhig says, need even more research than men's, because they're
used in the shower and in various ways, including in "some
places they can't see in a mirror." Here his beam becomes a
blush. It's hard to hide how you feel when you're one of the
best-shaven men on the planet.